Awakening to Stillness

Learning to Slow Down, and Find Yourself

Awakening to Stillness requires a “Slowing Down” of the Mind. It's impossible to stop thoughts from entering your mind but you can learn how to detach yourself from them thereby minimizing their impact. Stressful thoughts and drama are created by the Ego to completely occupy our time and distract us from reality. This is the purpose of the ego so that it can remain in controll of our lives.

The noise in your mind keeps you distracted from reality so that you never discover your true Self or become conscious. The "Real" lies in the stillness. In short, the ego is fighting for its survival by keeping you in an illusion.

The ego accomplishes this by convincing you that everything you think or do is important or precious, as if they were actually a part of you. The physical things themselves aren’t really the problem, it’s the attachment to them that keeps us imprisoned.

We can learn to keep the things we think and do in perspective by realizing that they ultimately don’t matter because they aren't everlasting.

Awakening to Stillness automatically starts to slow your life down. Then you will begin to contemplate Your life on a more regular basis which is another way of saying, you will become more conscious of each aspect of your life.

Some people find “tools” like Yoga or Meditation, helpful in slowing down and connecting with your spirit. Personally, I love taking long walks (without a cell phone or an I-Pod) and simply take in all the Beauty around me by paying close attention to it.

While walking, I feel the air enter and exit my lungs. I notice the sweat start to form on my body. I feel my muscles get warm. I notice the ground beneath my feet. And I take the time to fully take in all the sights and sounds around me. This means ignoring what I had for dinner last night or what projects I have on my agenda today.

Awakening to Stillness or learning to be present, is essential in the awakening process. One of our favorite author’s Eckhart Tolle, has written two books that discuss being in the present moment or what he would call, “living in the now”. These two books are called “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth”.

These books are well known and can be very helpful in focusing on the present. We highly recommend them to anyone who is Awakening to Stillness, and wants to learn how to live more in the present moment.

To learn more about Eckhart Tolle's work, visit his website at;
www.eckharttolle.com and by going to our webpage about Eckhart.

Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when mind is rendered "speechless", sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is Peace.
Exerpt from "The Power of Now" by Echart Tolle

"Awareness of the overall silent contextual field is facilitated by a contemplative lifestyle that could be likened to shifting interest from details to "the big picture." It "gets" overall qualities of atmosphere without going into specifics, and therefore intuits generalities rather than thinking or analyzing.
The resistance of the ego/mind is that it is afraid it might "miss" something, as it is addicted to processing the details of the content of form, which is the attraction and lure of the world. To "renounce the world" means to withdraw energy from it and decline activities that require attention to specifics, thereby abiding in the Self rather than in the amusements of the self."
David R Hawkins

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